Homo sapiens, homo faber: man as thinker, man as maker

It's really a great way to put it - learning as moving away from spoon feeding to play.  Connects right into Werbach's gamification theories.


There is another read about learning as being Thinkers (visible)  and doers (reflective): http://www.google.com/reader/view/#stream/user%2F11983355272208248882%2Fstate%2Fcom.google%2Fstarred

Gamification

Gamification

The use of game mechanics in a lot of mundane tasks esp. enhancing learning.

Here we see the badges, a way to structure a task that promotes achievement.

Anatomy of Fun

RELEVANCE TO EDUCATION (Learning)

Feedback

Here's a good way to get feedback.



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Great Teachers

Learning is an intensely sensory experience – three dimensionality in learning - it’s about greatly interactive experience.  They’re related to tastes and sound, great teachers understand that.

They don’t just plan and deliver lessons, they create  learning experiences.

Test score is the mark of the good teacher, but not of the great teacher. Greatness is something that transpire beyond the classroom. 

Great teachers teach students what they can do instead of what they cannot.

Two poles

Opposing views and difficult divergent assumptions.


This is how I am situated right now, on one end of the cliff.

They say that when you build a bridge, you always have to start with one side.  The problem I suppose is when the other side diverts the direction constantly, a sort of sifting bank that moves to another direction.

Example.

The assumption that people have good intentions as diametrically opposed to assuming that people will take advantage or manipulate.  How do you weave these.

My being seems to seek a better climate.

Plants need the right climate to grow, people all the more do so.

Love (written on the wall)

I can still remember it clearly.

Niko, by now a flying friend (he works as a pilot), told me he saw my grafitti in one classroom.

Well it was actually a response to a myopic anti-communist comment written on a wall beside my assigned chair in college.  What I remember best was when I wrote Corinthinians 13 or some parts of it mingled with dialectical jargon.

Anyway, chanced upon the same passage now... beautifully relevant as ever.

"If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. (1 Corinthians 13:1-7)"

Being brilliant every single day.

Dr. Watkins connects to what I have read in Brain Rules - stress affects learning.  Our physiology, the pressure it perceives, affect our ability to process information and our thinking.  He says its a DIY lobotomy of the frontal cortex - much closer to evolutionary adaptation when the brain becomes binary in its function - fight/flight or play dead when confronted with threat.

A 200,000 year old software but we did not get the upgrade.  200k years after, our brains still function the way it perceives threat in the environment, the necessity for survival.

Breathe Rhythmically And Through the Heart Everyday - to get to the mid point but have to stay on the positive side and move people towards it.

So it's not just whether one has adrenaline (psyched) or ach-acetylecholine (relaxed) but also whether one is positive (DHEA-dihydroendeansterum--the elixir of youth) or negative emotional state (hormone cortisol).  see 23.35 of video (wonderful schema of performance).

Really brilliant insights.